Legos!

In the process of cleaning my house this weekend I got carried away with all sorts of side projects and ended up completely destroying every single room. Every time I try to clean something I make a huge, crazy, mess. I get these big ideas and creative plans and then I destroy all cleanliness that is in my path. It ridiculous; it really is. I have a backwards version of OCD. The anti OCD. The kind of OCD you wouldn’t wish on your very largest, knurliest, enemy. I get ideas; I like to think of them as ground-breakingly, unique, ideas, to organize something differently. I start dumping out drawers and closets and then half way through I say fuck it, this is more work then I expected and there the mess, that I once had such high expectations for, stays for days upon days. It’s really disastrous. I am a human tornado. I’m like an annoying toddler that gets into stuff. It’s kind of how I live my life, half assed.

Last weekend I decided to waste hours upon hours on legos of all things. I had loads upon loads of laundry to do and dishes but instead I decided to tackle my kid’s ginormous Lego collection. I live my life in the most absurd manner. In the middle of the madness that I like to call organizing (the rest of the world calls destruction) Aaron walked into the boy’s room and very simply raised an eyebrow. I could tell by the simple, yet slightly condescendingly mockinking manner in which that eyebrow was raised that he was certain I would, as usual abandon said project half way through. That’s all it took for me to stay committed. I love a challenge and any and all opportunity to prove Aaron wrong. Every now and then I like to remind him of the fact that I am a perfectly capable human being. It’s the way our off kilter, happy, marriage works

My reasoning behind the Lego organizing was this: The boys are super duper into legos right now which I find pretty rad. Lego’s are a combination of creativity, mathematical calculations, and shear geniusness. I am all about them playing with Lego’s. Only problem is that they build stuff and then lose all the pieces and end up with a huge mass of Lego’s at the bottom of their toy bin.

I decided to separate all their legos in to colored categories: Gray, beige, brown, black, white, yellow, red, blue, green, and the less popular orange. They literally had one 20 gallon bin filled to the rim with all sorts of legos and another smaller bin of what I now call plastic cockroaches, because once you find one there are millions more everywhere. This was an all day task. The boys helped for about an hour and then realized that their mom is bananas and that the work was much too tedious, and abandoned the project altogether. SO, on my own, I organized thousands of tiny little legos into their own color coded little baggies.

I actually plan on eventually constructing shelves with jars drilled in to house this color coded system. My dad has a similar set up in his garage workshop that houses different kinds of nails and screws (why is that everything carpentry related has to be sexual, who came up with using nail and screw in a perverse way anyway, it was always so disconcerting to me as a carpenters daughter that all my dads tools were linked to sexual phrases like Hammer, screw, and nail. Why is the world so gross?). After I finished separating all of the legos into their own little baggies Aaron told me that the wiser move would have been to separate them by size shape and connecters

“You know, to make it easier to build stuff”.

I kind of wanted to punch him. He always comes up with the plans after all said and done. Besides, if I had done it that way it wouldn’t look as Martha Stewart esque. Sure it would have been more functional but there is something to be said for aesthetics. Anyway, along with the Lego madness I scrubbed and cleaned the boy’s room and it is now totally spotless. Sure the rest of the house is a complete disaster but at least their room looks good. Here are some pictures of the madness. I wish I had taken a before and after photo. This is the final result minus the shelves with jars which I will get to one of these days:
A couple of the baggies!


Kind of what I have in mind to do


the kid!



Seriously, it’s almost worth the entire day of color coding.